The US Commerce department just dropped a bomb on ZTE, requiring all US companies to obtain an export license if they wish to do business with the company. Article updated continuously as more information filters in.Requires Optical Active Insight subscription.

LinkedIn joined the cool kids and built its own 100G switch based on Broadcom Tomahawk.

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To be clear, LinkedIn didn’t do hardware design, they bought a white box and wrote their own software. The only technical reason provided for doing this was “We need better buffer visibility”. This was debated on twitter with the argument that if you need to do this you are doing it wrong.

Why do I never see AMZN/FBOOK/GOOG talking about buffers in switches ? Probably because they don’t actually matter.

Aside from greater development control, the real reason LinkedIn went with white box was to save money. The article cites licensing costs per switch – LinkedIn did the math and determined an ongoing fixed R&D expenditure and vertical integration was cheaper. LinkedIn is a company with $750M in annual R&D and can justify building their own tools.]

Lumentum is the second largest optical component supplier and like Finisar, a bellwether of demand for both telecom and datacom equipment. We look at why their ROADM business is ramping as well as their strategy for CFP2-ACO and QSFP28.Requires Optical Active Insight subscription.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of “Keck’s law”. The author coined it. But it’s a good summary by IEEE Spectrum on the work being done to encroach further on the Shannon limit, and includes a slick graphic of fiber capacity over the decades.

Apple is currently building 2.5mm square feet of data center space, which is nearly 40% of Amazon’s existing datacenter square footage at the end of 2015. DCI expenditure is one of the main drivers of 30% YoY capex growth at Apple.

Morgan Stanley estimates Apple will spend about $1B on Amazon AWS in 2016, which is around 10% of total AWS revenue. This could move internal within 2 years.

Virtually all of the CPUs used in data centers come from Intel, therefore the Data Center group sales are a useful macro barometer for the growth and outlook of data center spending.Requires Optical Active Insight subscription.

MultiPhy’s efforts with non-coherent 100G 4×28 solutions for metro interconnect met with limited success. Finisar was first to market with this approach, and their largest customer ADVA sold it with great success. But the volumes for this approach so far are dwarfed by shipments of coherent solutions.

Like InPhi, which has already invested heavily, MultiPhy will target the much larger volumes of the 2km datacenter market first then look to stretch the capabilities of PAM-4 to attack the 100G metro access market.